Ooooo! Pretty!!
I thought it looked more like a sea anemone or other sea creature. I found a picture of a basketstar, and tweaked that.
Then I thought “What the heck are basketstars, anyway?!” so I spent an hour reading about them. They’re related to starfish, and some of them are incredibly ornate. This is a picture from Wiki Commons.
Which doesn’t have much to do with APOD except to say that the universe is full of beautiful, ornate, mysterious things, and it’s great to spend a little time contemplating that every day! 
That starfish would make a great avatar.
Good idea! I tried it but you lose so much detail at that size
Cool symbol though, looks like a tree-of-life fused to a 5-pointed star.
Or a starfish with a 'fro.
That’s facinating and hard to look away from!
Here’s more by the same artist–
I had some classes in biological illustration and Haeckel’s stuff just blows me away. I was able to draw, ex. one orchid on a white background-- and even then would get a kind of “altered consciousness” experience from following all the warty bumps and iridescent patches and detail upon detail. I don’t see how Haeckel did this work!! Different kind of training back then I guess! 
more about Haeckel
Haeckel promoted Charles Darwin’s work in Germany and developed the controversial “recapitulation theory” claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species’ entire evolutionary development, or phylogeny: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” .